Authors: Joanna Connors
My PTSD was chronic, the therapist told me. I will always have to deal with it. Still, I didn’t want my drug consumption to be lifelong. I’ve tried several times to wean myself off Prozac, without success. My insomnia returns, my nervous system goes into overdrive, I become touchy and irritable, and I experience strange symptoms: a metallic taste in my mouth, like I’m chewing on pennies, accompanied by random jolts all over my body that feel like tiny electric shocks.
I asked my therapist what I should do.
“If you were diabetic, would you decide you should be strong enough to go off insulin?” she asked.
In July of 2007, I had finished reading every document and transcript that gave me an excuse to stay home. It was time to go out into the world and look for people who knew David Francis.
I still wasn’t sure what I would find as I looked into my rapist’s background. I wanted to know more about him, to answer the question “Why him?” But I wanted and needed more than that. I wanted meaning. Context. I wanted a narrative that would make sense of my rape and explain why David Francis found me that July day, what forces led us to that spot where we collided.
First I looked for his two alibi witnesses from the trial. They had moved or married and changed their names so many times, their public records trail led me nowhere. Social Security death records told me that David Francis’s mother, Millie Francis, also known as Matia Rodriques, died in August of 1984, the month after her son raped me, and two months before the trial. She
was sixty-four years old. Her boyfriend, Earlie B. Giles, died in 1999, when he was seventy.
Next, I went back through the parole reviews for David Francis, inmate #A181-778, who was up for parole in 1991, 1995, 1997, and 2000, all without my knowledge. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction instituted a victim notification system not long after David Francis went to prison. The system contacted victims who had officially registered for it, and of course only victims in new cases were told it was necessary to register. The victims of criminals who were already in prison were never told we had to register, so we never knew when our perpetrators came up for parole.
The parole forms require the inmate to identify people who will help them in their post-prison “parole plan.” Twice, David Francis gave the name and address of Ida Taylor, once saying she was his grandmother, the second time his aunt. I could not find a working phone number for her, so I would have to go into the Hough neighborhood to see if she still lived at that address.
It takes ten minutes to drive to Hough from Shaker Heights, a distance of a few miles that covers an enormous divide. The drive leads across the border of the America that Andrew Hacker called, in the title of his 1992 book,
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
. It leads into the heart of the rust-belt city that the U.S. Census Bureau designated the poorest big city in America in both 2004 and 2006. In that poorest city, Hough is the poorest neighborhood.
Taylor’s house is just three and a half blocks from 79th Street and Hough Ave., the corner that was the epicenter of
the Hough riots in the summer of 1966—the decade of racial unrest and riots in America. It started outside the Seventy-Niners’ Café when the white owner refused to give a black resident a glass of water, and then taped a sign to the door reading: “No Water for Niggers.” The six nights of arson and violence that followed left four dead—all of them black—and dozens injured. Countless acts of vandalism and hundreds of fires devastated the already struggling neighborhood, which never fully recovered. The following year, Carl Stokes was elected the first black mayor of a major American city, but racial tensions did not go away. In 1968, riots erupted again, in the nearby Glenville neighborhood.
In 1981, fifteen years after the Hough riots, Cuyahoga common pleas judge Burt Griffin wrote in his book
Cities Within a City
, “Hough ranks near the top in all of Cleveland’s disagreeable statistics—welfare recipients, crime, abandoned buildings, rate of illegitimate births and school dropouts.”
By 2007, when I went to find Ida Taylor, I could see scattered signs of recovery. A few brand-new McMansions and rows of town houses occupied long-vacant lots, but they shared blocks with abandoned houses boarded up with plywood and lots filled with weeds and trash.
I was afraid to go into the unfamiliar area alone, so I called my friend Sue, a psychiatric nurse whose work took her into Hough and Cleveland’s other poor and distressed areas every day. She made house calls to recently released patients from the city’s public mental health hospital, cajoling them to take their medications. She routinely went beyond her official job description, though, giving her clients coats and clothes, or finding their long-lost relatives.
I once went with her on a Saturday afternoon as she tried to track down a set of dentures one of her clients lost when the police found the woman outside on a cold evening, naked and shouting, and carted her off to the hospital. The search ended when Sue took her client—who was not only toothless but blind—back to her abandoned house in East Cleveland and kicked in the door. I knew Sue would be game to go along on this venture of mine.
We drove into Hough on a bright Saturday morning, with me gripping the steering wheel of my minivan while Sue talked and laughed, reapplied her lip gloss a few times, and, in general, appeared to be on her way to a fabulous party. We pulled up to an enormous house, one of the many mansions built a hundred years back, when Hough was a swank neighborhood and still home to the city’s haughtiest private boys’ school. The school had long since relocated to Shaker Heights, and no one would call Taylor’s home a mansion now. It needed a paint job, moss grew on the roof, the front porch slumped precipitously to one side. A planter in the bare front yard held plastic flowers. Sue told me to park across the street so we could watch the house for a while before we approached.
After ten or fifteen minutes, a stocky man walked up the driveway and went inside; a minute later, we saw him peering out at us from a front window. Sue decided we had to either leave or knock on the door—no more waiting. I chose the door.
I knocked and the man answered, opening the door just a crack. “What do you want?” he said. “I saw you over there in your car.”
Reporters do this all the time, knocking on the doors of strangers they can’t reach any other way, but I had never done a story that required it. I was lucky: Reporters hate doing it. It’s scary and rude, and we know the intrusions are a major reason Americans have such a low opinion of the media.
The man standing in front of me was not making it easy. My nervous system revved into overdrive, ready for me to run.
“I’m looking for Ida Taylor,” I said. “Does she still live here?”
He looked at me with suspicion and nodded.
“Is she home?” I asked.
“What do you want with her?”
“I’m a reporter for
The Plain Dealer.”
This was true and not true. At that point, in 2006, I was working on the story by myself, on my own time, not for
The Plain Dealer
.
I had told one trusted editor about it, an editor who had helped me move from reviewing movies to writing long-form journalism, but I had not asked for an official assignment because I wasn’t sure this story, whatever it became, would fit the newspaper model.
I wanted to write about my rape in detail—detail no newspaper would print—to show that rape is not what most people imagine it is from watching movies. It is not dramatic, or exciting, and I was not “brave” during it, as so many people assured me I was. I was not brave afterward when I testified. I did what I had to do. I went through the motions required by both the rapist and the legal system. I was, in fact, a coward, living in fear of the death I had glimpsed.
So when the man at Ida Taylor’s front door asked me what I wanted with her, I had a vague answer prepared, the answer I would give everyone I encountered as I went along.
“I’m doing a story on men who died in prison in Ohio,” I said, “and I think she knew one of them.”
True, but not the whole truth. I thought it would shut people down entirely if I said, “I was raped, I’m doing a story about the man who did it, and I know you knew him.” So I came up with the “men who died in prison” explanation.
“Is she home?” I asked again.
He closed the door on me. It occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned prison.
I turned and fled, with Sue right behind. We were almost to the minivan when an older woman opened the front door. “Somebody want to speak to me?” she called.
Ida Taylor didn’t ask questions after we introduced ourselves and I told her I was a reporter. She invited us in and led us to the living room, apologizing for how slow she was. Bad knees, she said. Arthritis.
She motioned for us to sit on the couch and eased her bulk into a chair across the room, beneath a framed portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. Next to him, someone had hung a pink Mother’s Day card that was as big as a movie poster.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
I told her I was looking for information about her nephew, David Francis, who died in prison. She looked puzzled.
“David Francis?” she asked. “Who’s that?”
I explained about finding her name on the parole records.
“Oh, David
Francis
,” she said. “Millie’s son. He’s not my nephew.”
I knew from looking her up on Nexis that Taylor was seventy-one, but she seemed at least ten years older. She’d raised her ten children in this house, she told us, five Harrisons from her first marriage and five Taylors from her second. Grandchildren and friends had lived with her, too, over the years.
But David Francis? No, he never lived there. His mother Millie did.
Taylor said she met Millie back in the ‘70s, at a neighborhood after-hours joint that a woman named Velma Chaney ran out of her basement. Millie was new to Cleveland, and told Ida she was on the run from her husband back in Boston, afraid he would find her and kill her. She brought her two youngest children to Cleveland with her, and David showed up not long after that, on his own. Charlene, Millie’s oldest, was married to a man from Cleveland and already here.
Taylor said she let Millie move into an upstairs bedroom when she was down on her luck.
“This house has had some of everybody living here,” she said. “My kids come and go; grandkids. Long as you abide by my rules, I’ll have you.”
When she moved to Ida’s house, Millie gave her two youngest children to Velma Chaney to raise. Taylor remembered that. It was sad. But she said she didn’t really remember David. He wasn’t around much.
She called into the dining room: “Do either of you remember David Francis?”
The man who answered the door appeared with another man, both of them eating burgers half-wrapped in bright yellow paper.
“David Francis?” the second one said. “No.”
Taylor thought for a minute. “I remember now,” she said. “They called me from the prison to say he died. It was years ago.”
“He died in August of 2000,” I said.
“I don’t know why they called me,” Taylor said. “But they said my name was in his file, and they wanted to know what I wanted to do with his body. I said, ‘I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, his mother is dead. His brothers and sisters are in Boston, but I don’t know any of their numbers. You’ll have to do with him what you do. I don’t have the money to bury him.’”
She shook her head. “I hated it, but there was nothing else I could do.”
Ida looked over at the men. “These are my sons,” she said. “Russell and Gregory. Russell is the oldest of all my kids.”
Russell, who wore a gold cross the size of an Olympic medal, corrected his mother. He was the
Reverend
Russell Harrison, he told us before settling down on the couch so close to Sue he was almost touching her. He gave her a sly wink and a “let me buy you a drink” smile.
Gregory, who had answered the door, was still suspicious of us. He sat down near his mother and stared at us, saying nothing, while Russell nudged closer to Sue.
“What’s your name?” Russell asked her. “And tell me why I never met you before.”
Sue looked at him and laughed. “Oh, please,” she said. He laughed, too.
“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I just like the ladies.”
Later, I would recognize Russell’s name coming up, here and there, in David Francis’s police records. Back in the ‘70s, they’d been arrested together a few times for breaking and entering.
Taylor, her memories coming back to her, said that Millie hooked up with Earlie B. Giles at the after-hours joint.
“Earlie B.,” Russell said. “He the guy with one eye missing?”
Taylor nodded.
She said Earlie B. came with Millie when she moved into the house. “They stayed in their room most of the time and drank,” Taylor said. “She was a stone alcoholic. And she had that crippling arthritis real bad. It was hard for her to go up and down the stairs.”
In the summer of 1984, Millie’s arthritis and the drinking got so bad, her oldest daughter took her back to Boston. A couple of months after that, Taylor heard she died in a house fire up there.
“She was in a wheelchair on the second floor,” Taylor said. “She burned up. They say her husband set the fire, but no one ever proved it.”
Taylor said she thought Millie’s youngest daughter, Laura, still lived in Cleveland.
“I heard she got into drugs and was on the stroll,” Russell said. “But I saw her about a year ago at the food bank down on Superior. She said she was a Christian now. She was going to a church up around there somewhere.”
He couldn’t remember the name of the church or where it might be. None of them knew how to get in touch with her, or with any of the kids who went back to Boston.
“I haven’t thought about Millie or her kids in years,” Ida said.
Later, I called my sister Nancy to tell her about Ida and the parole records and the two sons. “They remembered his mother, but they didn’t remember him,” I said.
“Wow,” Nancy said. “What if it turns out that you’re the only person left who does?”